The price fluctuations for skins in CS:GO can be quite impressive. Some game items skyrocket in price shortly after release, when player interest is at its peak, and then slowly fall in price. Others, on the contrary, rise in price gradually, but steadily. You can view price dynamics for specific items on the official Marketplace on Steam or other platforms. It often helps to understand in which direction the price is moving and whether it is profitable to buy a skin for CS:GO right now. And for those who are serious about collecting skins, information about what factors can affect their cost will be useful.
Supply and Demand
The main reason that prices for skins change – the fact that Valve does not impose any restrictions on the market. Players can exchange with each other, sell and buy skins on different sites, which means the price will obey market laws. This means that it is influenced by supply and demand, that is, the popularity of the skin, the number of players and the total number of skins available.
Skins appeared in the game in 2013, and since then the number of players has grown by several orders of magnitude. Ten years ago, the daily peak online was about 50 thousand users, but now it can exceed a million. (One of the record values was recorded recently, immediately after the update was released.) As a result, the cost of skins increases – especially when it comes to items from old collections that no longer drop out or drop out very rarely.
Popularity of cases
The ratio of supply and demand well explains the dynamics of prices for old skins, but approximately the same thing happens with relatively new ones. Even weapon skins that appeared in the game after it began to gain hundreds of thousands of players can also increase sharply in price.
To understand why this happens, you need to take into account one more factor – the probability of a particular game item falling out. From the very beginning, the main way for players to get skins in the game was by opening cases that dropped after the match. At the same time, the probability of their loss differs. For example, "Fracture" players come across quite often, and more than 200 thousand copies of it are sold on the Marketplace. It is not surprising that even the rarest items that a player can get when opening them drop in price. For example, the AK-47 Anubis has fallen in price by about five dollars over the past year.
Availability of skins
But with the prices of skins for CS:GO, which can only drop for a limited time, the situation is the opposite. A good example – one of the relatively new skins that have already gained a high price – AWP Gugnir. Due to the fact that it is part of a collection that was only available during Operation Shattered Web, it has a limited supply on the market. There are now just over 3,000 copies in the game and, given that this is a skin for a popular type of weapon, it is not surprising that its price can be measured in thousands of dollars.
Thus, the price of skins changes under the influence of several factors: the relationship between supply and demand, changes in the number of players, the popularity of certain items, as well as their availability. If you're planning to buy CS:GO skins with the expectation that they will become more expensive in the future, look for items from rare cases and collections, as well as those that may become rare in the future. Regardless of what skins you like, you can purchase them at Lis-Skins.com at very attractive prices.
